LAS VEGAS — (BUSINESS WIRE) — January 9, 2018 —
Cognata, Ltd., today announced that it is launching the first
cloud-based simulation engine for autonomous vehicle validation powered
with technologies from NVIDIA and Microsoft. The announcement was made
at
CES
2018 in Las Vegas, where Cognata is exhibiting Jan. 9 – 12, 2018, at
Westgate
2301 & 2303, Tech East.

The
Cognata
platform leverages artificial intelligence, deep learning, and computer
vision to provide the only solution capable of validating autonomous
vehicles with unlimited scalability today. The
NVIDIA
DRIVE platform supports autonomous applications with software that helps
developers and researchers optimize, validate, and deploy their work.
Cognata will run the combined technologies on the
Microsoft
Azure cloud-based platform. The collaborative solution represents a
major milestone for the autonomous vehicle industry, and promises to
bring safer self-driving vehicles to market much faster than anticipated.

“As Cognata launches our cloud based simulation platform and removes the
hardware barrier from the simulation world, it’s gratifying for us to
work with major tech powers like NVIDIA and Microsoft,” Cognata CEO
Danny Atsmon says. “There’s a natural synergy in our technologies that
will help us continue to develop the most powerful platform available,
and ensure that our customers can drive as many miles as they choose,
with the cloud-enabled flexibility of adding additional computing
resources on the fly.”

NVIDIA DRIVE is a cloud-to-car scalable AI platform that enables
autonomous vehicles to understand their environment and drive safely. By
training and testing deep neural networks in the datacenter, and then
performing real-time, low-latency inferencing in the vehicle, it enables
Level 2 through Level 5 driving systems.

“NVIDIA partners with the world’s leading automakers, including Audi,
Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Tesla, and it’s equally important to work with
important, dynamic, startups like Cognata,” says Rishi Dhall, Senior
Director, Business Development at NVIDIA. “Its GPU-based innovations are
fueling new solutions for the transportation industry.”

The alliance with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform helps Cognata bring
the power of scaled cloud computing infrastructure to the automotive
world, along with NVIDIA’s cloud-based GPU technology. Car makers are
required to accumulate 10 billion miles worth of test drives, which can
take years to complete. Cognata’s simulation platform can advance that
process by enabling autonomous vehicle manufacturers to log highly
realistic virtual test drives on the virtual roadways of its simulated
environment, thereby trimming years off the road-testing process.

“Breakthrough cloud technologies like AI and machine learning are
rapidly changing how we think about driving—or not driving,” says Doug
Seven, Principal Group Product Manager, Microsoft. “To take advantage of
the opportunities, car makers are leaning on and working with companies
like Cognata who have expertise in advanced simulation technology and
with Microsoft because we are one of a few tech platforms that truly
have the global cloud infrastructure and have met regulatory commitments
required to support connected vehicles.”

Further, the Cognata simulation engine cloud-based services allows auto
makers to avoid the expense of substantial upgrades to their
infrastructure that the validation process would otherwise require. “We
are enabling vehicle OEMs, tier-one and tier-two companies in the
autonomous market to drive millions of miles that would normally require
multi-million-dollar initial investments in hardware,” Atsmon notes. The
platform is not hosted on local servers, so users don’t need to add
hardware and are not limited by local server capacity.

About Cognata

Cognata provides a fast lane to autonomous driving with its testing and
evaluation solution for self-driving vehicles—a realistic automotive
simulation platform where virtual cars travel virtual roads in virtual
cities, all remarkably true to real-world conditions. Led by CEO Danny
Atsmon, a widely respected expert in ADAS and deep learning, Cognata
brings the disruptive potential of artificial intelligence, deep
learning, and computer vision to the autonomous driving simulation
world. Cognata’s simulated testing and evaluation environment shaves
years off the validation time by generating fast, highly accurate
results, and eliminates the safety concerns, high costs, and limited
scalability of road-testing in the physical world. Cognata was founded
in 2016 by a team of experts in deep learning, autonomous vehicles and
computer vision. The company is headquartered in Rehovot, Israel, close
to the Weizmann Institute of Science. For more information, visit
http://www.cognata.com.